Translation as a Form

A Centennial Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”

Douglas Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000589719
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is a book-length commentary on Walter Benjamin's 1923 essay "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers," best known in English under the title "The Task of the Translator." Benjamin's essay is at once an immensely attractive work for top-flight theorists of translation and comparative literature and a frustratingly cryptic work that cries out for commentary. Almost every one of the claims he makes in it seems wildly counterintuitive, because he articulates none of the background support that would help readers place it in larger literary-historical contexts: Jewish mystical traditions from Philo Judaeus's Logos-based Neoplatonism to thirteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah; Romantic and post-Romantic esotericisms from Novalis and the Schlegels to Hölderlin and Goethe; modernist avant-garde foreclosures on "the public" and generally the communicative contexts of literature.

The book is divided into 78 passages, from one to a few sentences in length. Each of the passages becomes its own commentarial unit, consisting of a Benjaminian interlinear box, a paraphrase, a commentary, and a list of other commentators who have engaged the specific passage in question. Because the passages cover the entire text of the essay in sequence, reading straight through the book provides the reader with an augmented experience of reading the essay.

Robinson's commentary is key reading for scholars and postgraduate students of translation, comparative literature, and critical theory.

COMMENTARY

DOI: 10.4324/9781003247227-2

0. The title

Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers

The Task of the Translator

Paraphrase: The Task of the Translator.

Commentary: Jacques Derrida (1985: 175) comments that “the title also says, from its first word, the task (Aufgabe), the mission to which one is destined (always by the other), the commitment, the duty, the debt, the responsibility. Already at stake is a law, an injunction for which the translator has to be responsible.” In his commentary/deconstruction Derrida directs a good deal of attention to the debt, to the translator’s responsibility: “The translator is indebted, he appears to himself as translator in a situation of debt; and his task is to render, to render that which must have been given” (176).¹

That is certainly what one would normally think “task” meant, but Antoine Berman (2008/2018: 40) argues that that ordinary sense of task is severely attenuated in the essay. “This is a text,” he writes, “that is more preoccupied with translation than with the translator. We could perfectly well replace each occurrence of the word ‘translator’ with the word ‘translation’.” The word Übersetzer “translator” appears 20 times in the text—one of those in the title—and, according to Berman, in not one of those cases does Benjamin specify what the translator must do to carry out his or her responsibility adequately. The ostensible task of the translator in every case is reportedly to achieve a mystical transformation of the source and target languages that no human translator could ever possibly set out to achieve. As Hans Vermeer (1996: 99) puts it:

1 Dominik Zechner (2020: 323n12) notes that “the reason Derrida calls Benjamin’s translator ‘indebted’ lies in his understanding of the German term ‘Aufgabe’ (‘task’), which may well be interpreted as the inheritance of a certain debt or responsibility.”

Wahrheit, Totalität aller Sinne, Verkörperung der Urideen der reinen Sprache und Hinführung auf die Vollendung und Überhöhung des Seins—das soll die Übersetzung leisten. Und nicht etwa ein Original!—möchte man hinzufügen. Oder persönlich ausgedrückt: Das ist die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, der damit weit höher gestellt wird als ein Autor eines Originalwerks.

Truth, the totality of all meaning, embodying the primordial idea of pure language, and transporting us to the perfection and exaltation of being—that is what translation is supposed to accomplish. And not an original!—one would like to add. Or to put it in personal terms: that is the task of the translator, who is thus ranked much higher than any source author.²

Benjamin’s idea in Berman’s and Vermeer’s readings would appear to be that translation achieves that transformation, whether the translator wills it or not, and whether the translator is aware of participating in it or not. But actually the transformation is not exactly achieved by translation either, as if that transformation were the task of translation; it is simply (or complexly) a kind of inevitable byproduct of translation. It is just sort of what happens when translation takes place. According to Berman there is no task, really.

Berman (2008/2018: 42–44) also goes on to argue intriguingly that in his title and elsewhere Benjamin was drawing on a German Romantic tradition going back to Novalis (1965/1981: 535) linking die Aufgabe “the task” with die Auflösung “the resolution/dissolution.” “The ‘task,’” Berman argues, “is always confronted with a state of affairs that needs ‘resolving’” (43), including “solution in the logical sense (of a problem),” “(dis)solution in the chemical sense (of a substance),” and “(re)solution in the sense of musical harmony” (43). This all seems a bit of a stretch, from die Aufgabe to die Auflösung, until Berman quotes one of Novalis’s fragments, to the effect that “die Poesie löst fremdes Daseyn in Eignen auf” (quoted in Berman 48n42). Chantal Wright translates that as “Poetry dissolves the foreign within itself” (43), but it could be rendered more closely as “Poetry dissolves foreign being/presence/existence in its own [being/presence/existence].” “The task of poetry,” therefore, Berman concludes, “is the dissolution of the foreign in its true essence, language” (43). In the abstract, this still seems somewhat far-fetched; but see the commentary to #51 for conclusive evidence that Berman is right.

2 Except where otherwise indicated, all translations from the German are my own.

The other interesting challenge to the usual reading of Benjamin’s title as promising to specify a “task” to be performed by a human being called a “translator” comes from Paul de Man (1986, 2000). Drawing our attention to Benjamin’s self-admitted failure as a practical translator himself, of Baudelaire and Proust, de Man notes that in the normative understanding of the work the translator fails by definition: “The translator can never do what the original text did. Any translation is always second in relation to the original, and the translator as such is lost from the very beginning” (2000: 20). Hence de Man’s suggestive retranslation of die Aufgabe as “the surrender, the giving up.” That is, after all, what the word means morphologically, and how it is used in certain contexts:

If the text is called “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” we have to read this title more or less as a tautology: Aufgabe, task, can also mean the one who has to give up. If you enter the Tour de France and you give up, that is the Aufgabe—“er hat aufgegeben,” he doesn’t continue in the race anymore. It is in that sense also the defeat, the giving up, of the translator. The translator has to give up in relation to the task of refinding what was there in the original. (20)

This obviously flips the whole title on its head, and from that upside-down position actually reflects the passivity that Berman, de Man, and Vermeer insist Benjamin more or less casually assigns to the translator much better than the translation of die Aufgabe as “the task.” The only real task in the essay is performed by “the languages,” as vitalistic agents with transcendental intentions; those agents are inadvertently triggered by translations, and translations are rather haplessly cobbled together by translators.

Now this reading of the title and the essay it problematically encapsulates is plausible, and attractive; I myself argued a similar case in Robinson (1996: 201). Working on this commentary, however, has directed my attention much more closely to the text than on previous readings, and that has changed my mind. The fact is that Benjamin does specify that the translator’s task is to translate literally, so as to transfer source-textual syntax (rather than sense) into the target language and in that way to maximize the friction between the two languages; and he gives us several quite practical takes on that.

In #44, for example, he says that “the task of the translator lies in finding that target-language intention that awakens the echo of the source text”—a task that sounds a bit strange, perhaps, and not immediately accessible to practical application, but not impossibly mystical. The phrase could very well awaken the imaginative translator’s practical sense to new possibilities.

In #69 “it is the translator’s task to transcreate the source text in which pure language is imprisoned, in order to unleash in the target language that pure language that is spellbound in the source language.” That sounds not only mystical but like a task set the hero of a fairy tale; but Benjamin goes on to illustrate his definition of that task with actual examples: “For pure language’s sake the translator smashes through the target language’s rotten barricades: Luther, Voß, Hölderlin, and George all pushed back the boundaries of the German language.” Again, the reference to pure language sounds mystical, but if we read that in the opposite direction, he seems to be saying that the translator’s task is to push back the boundaries of the target language, and that that does serve pure language. (Certainly it would seem a stretch to argue that in translating the Bible Luther was guided by a mystical translation strategy.³)

And finally, when he tells us in #76 that Friedrich Hölderlin’s German translations from the ancient Greek of Pindar and Sophocles are “prototypes of their Form,” we learn that the translator’s task is to do what Hölderlin did—translate not only literally but etymologically, so that the sense of the source text drops away and leaves only the letter, fidelity to the letter, or radical literalism. He also gives us a chilling account of the phenomenology of that task: in those brilliant translations “lurks the most appalling primal peril of all translation: that when the gates of language have been so savagely sprung they may slam shut and enclose the translator in silence. The translations of Antigone and Oedipus Rex were Hölderlin’s last work. In them sense plunges from abyss to abyss until it risks losing itself in the bottomless pit of language.” This would be the most radically extreme version of the translator’s task; and, according to Benjamin, the willingness to incur that spiritual risk made Hölderlin’s translations prototypical, better (and holier) even than “the most perfect translations.”

So upon further reflection I think Berman is wrong about replacing every reference to “the translator” with “translation”; his reading works with most of those references, but not with all. I also think that de Man was partly wrong about Benjamin conceiving the translator’s task as “giving up,” and that I too was partly wrong to follow de Man in Translation and Taboo. Throughout most of the essay, yes, the agents with a “task” to perform are not translators or translations but vitalistic languages, which are only triggered indirectly by translation and more indirectly still by translators; but that is not the only approach Benjamin offers to the phenomenology of translating. It now seems to me, therefore, that Derrida was also right: Benjamin does in the end—not all the way through, but at least in the end—write “The Task of the Translator” about the task of the translator.

3 But see Louth (1998: 9) for the suggestion that in his Bible translation Luther extended not only elite literary German by mobilizing colloquial German for literary use but also low colloquial German by translating key passages literally—and, further, that in so doing Luther was simply putting into practice Jerome’s claim in the letter to Pammachius that he translated sense for sense except in translating scripture, where even the word order contains a mystery. Antoine Berman (2008/2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Commentary
• References
• Index